Friday, September 5, 2014

The jobs number this morning...

...was a disappointment: the economy added only 142,000 to payrolls in August, the lowest monthly total of the year. Bummer.

But take a step back and you'll notice that all of the jobs lost during the Great Recession have been gained back. There are now 139 million people -- a record -- working in the United States. That's good news.

The bad news, as you can see from the chart above, is that austerity at the state and local level has cost over 600,000 jobs since mid-2008. What if public sector hiring had kept pace with the rate of population growth? Wouldn't there be more private demand in the economy? Wouldn't we be better off?